Government should not be in the education business

Why do we keep this failed system in place?

When I started the Idaho Freedom Foundation in 2008, I was told that there were certain words one should never speak in polite company if you wanted to be taken seriously:

“Government should not be in the education business.”

Why the fear of these words? Because Americans have been conditioned to believe that public education is “the great equalizer’ and without a system of government-run schools, people would be poor, illiterate, and likely future guests of the prison system.

These are lies.

What are American schoolchildren learning? Not much, except how to be obedient prisoners.

The idea that education is the great equalizer comes from the OG societal malefactor Horace Mann, who ran Massachusetts’ education system in the mid 19th century. It is he who wrote the oft repeated axiom that education “is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

I don’t dispute the value of education. I do, however, dispute the value of an education system run by government. Across the country, and for decades, public schools have utterly failed America’s schoolchildren. From about age 5 to 18, local, state, and federal governments spend about $250,000 per student. Yet the results of this expenditure of funds is, to be polite, less than stellar.

I’ll oversimplify the results from standardized tests, but these routinely show that fewer than half of America’s schoolchildren graduate high school with basic reading and math skills. Read the results for yourself. They’re not new, and they’re not confined to a single state. Even states that would be considered “the best in the country” are merely the skinniest kids at the fat camp.

This is why grown ass adults with a high school diploma can’t seem to make change, read cursive, can’t find China on a map, explain what World War I was about, and can’t tell you the difference between their, there, and they’re.

So why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep depending on the government school system to teach kids? Because, and in no particular order:

• Every state has a constitutional requirement to maintain a public education system, and by golly, if the constitution says it, then we must not rethink the requirement at any cost.

• No politician wants to challenge the status quo because more than closing down the broken system, they want to stay in office. Even the ones who claim to be “pro-school choice” would never stick their necks out to dismantle the existing failed system. Parents, the politicians will say, should have the choice to send their kids to the failing schools that the politicians oversee.

• Above all else, the education system is consistently good at doing one thing: being a daycare. Parents love the idea of their children having a place to go while they do, uh, other stuff.

• The education system is its own very big and very powerful lobby. We call this lobby “Education Inc.,” and it spends untold amounts of money to lobby legislators, governors, and parents to maintain the system and all of its instrumentalities, e.g., textbooks, computer hardware and software, food service products and equipment, and, of course, staff/union members.

• Businesses want a system that breeds compliance and dutifulness, and they want a system that frees parents to be in the workforce, more than they want a system that frees parents to be parents.

• Think tanks, which should be shouting from the rooftops that public schools are destroying the country with an uneducated citizenry would rather blather on about education choice, new education standards, and union busting, as if these would fix the problem. It hasn’t. It won’t.

• Government benefits from the system it manages. It’s a system that indoctrinates kids into worshiping government, who grow into adults that worship government.

I’ll explore more of these factors individually in future articles, but I’ll leave this one at this: In the 1800s, it was a radical idea to make government the central provider of provider of the public’s education. In the 21st century, we should be similarly bold and radical and say that is well past time for the government to be out of the education business.

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